Get updated in the wonderful world of jAlbum

Bo Brandsborg loves travel and photography – and has created hundreds of truly amazing photo albums telling the story from many different places around the world.

- You take amazing photos. What got you into photography?Thank you very much. I got bit by the travel bug in the mid 90'es - so I bought my first camera shortly after. I quickly realised that the camera made me see and remember many more places, people and sights on my trips. When you are always on the hunt for a picture you pay so much more attention to your surroundings. For me it was the perfect combo. Then it just took off! I couldn't - and still cant - go anywhere without my camera.

- Tell us a little about your nonprofitAs I take a lot of pictures of people, it seemed so much easier for me to specify on my website that I'm working on a non-profit basis, which I really am. Photography is still just a hobby for me. However - if the future brings any changes on this subject I would have to reconsider.

- You’ve traveled to lots of interesting places - Is there any place you remember in particular?I travelled to Kashmir in 2012, I think it was. The Kashmir Valley is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Even if Kashmir is subject to a boundary dispute between Pakistan and India - and Indian military is visible on every street corner - it once again showed me that the World is out there - and that travelling is not nearly as dangerous and impossible as one might think. Kashmir was FANTASTIC! Other all time favorites are: The Greek Islands, Malaysia, Namibia and South America.

- We’re naturally very happy that you’re using jAlbum. What made you choose our software for your photography workflow?I am not a software/camera expert, so I knew that I needed to find a user friendly and easy solution. I googled and found jAlbum almost immediately. I have now been using jAlbum - and ONLY jAlbum for many years and I love the program! Gallery design is important for me, so I try to find skins that look really good......and there's a lot to choose from on jAlbum. So I'm still very happy with my jAlbums :)

Many thanks Bo and we're naturally looking forward to new amazing travel albums!

Haven't we all been there, buying the new cool camera, mobile phone or graphics card just to realize it's not the latest and greatest a month thereafter?

It's naturally inevitable that technology moves forward, but the feeling of just missing a new release is annoying. The same holds for software licenses. At jAlbum, we're now at version 12.5. People suspecting that we may release v13 tomorrow could hesitate to purchase a license today.

We've now made a change to resolve this problem. You're no longer buying a license for "version xyz" of jAlbum. The license instead includes a 12 months support and update plan. This means that you're guaranteed priority support and free updates, big or small within 12 months. After that you can still continue using the version you have at that time (the license doesn't expire), but to enjoy future updates and priority support you can extend your support and update plan another 12 months to a discounted price. It's as simple as that. So, what are you waiting for, get a license for jAlbum today!

If you already bought a v12 license you shouldn't need to regret that you didn't wait. When we release v13 we will be adding the 12 months support and update plan to the date you purchased your v12 license free of charge. Now isn't that fair?

We’d like to summarize some improvements made lately with the release of jAlbum 12.3 and 12.4. We hope you find that some of the things mentioned here justifies an update.

Just works better

In the recent months several improvements has been made to making jAlbum working as smoothly as possible, this includes minimizing RAM memory usage, robustness of file transfers and usability improvements as well as a number of bug fixes. Don’t suffer from problems that have been already been fixed (full list at release notes). Update your jAlbum today.

Test setup

These graphs illustrates RAM usage during a remake of a 50.000 image album (500 images per folder, Turtle skin). The max RAM used has been set to 400MB in order to provoke scarse memory conditions (normally set to 800MB).

jAlbum 12.3.5 memory profile

Memory usage peaking after only a couple of minutes. The processing thereafter slows down to come to an out-of-memory halt after processing 6000 of 50000 images.

jAlbum 12.4.0 memory profile

Linear memory usage over time. 50000 image album rebuilt in less than 6 minutes.

Help is here

The lack of proper online documentation was listed as the #1 cause of frustration by our users. With the introduction of jAlbum 12.3 we finally did something about that. jAlbum now has a well maintained wiki based online documentation at http://jalbum.net/help that documents every button, and best of all, you get access to the right help page by just clicking the blue “?” buttons in the corner of jAlbum’s windows or by hitting F1.

Turtle skin’s help system has been renewed too

Amongst many other skins Turtle’s help system got a facelift too. As a matter of fact it was rebuilt from ground. When you are on the skin’s settings page in jAlbum, clicking the blue help button will bring up the relevant Turtle help page. Besides giving explanation for each and every setting, the new page brings help collected by features too. You can also browse through all the sample albums easily.

Facebook importer

For the 12.3 release, we’ve added a handy Facebook importer to jAlbum. You can now easily import all or some of your Facebook images and albums along with titles and descriptions, just click the arrow of the Add button and select “From Facebook” from the menu!

+30

30 more trial days

If you haven’t evaluated jAlbum 12.3 or 12.4, now is the time. You get 30 trial days even if you’ve tried out earlier versions of jAlbum before. If you’re uncertain about upgrading, just install the current version aside of your existing version.

-50%

50% off for upgraders

We still offer those of you who upgrade from v11 to v12 a 50% discount on our licenses. Just ensure that you’re signed into jalbum.net when purchasing a new licence and the discount will be deducted automatically.

Get in touch!

We appreciate knowing what you think of jAlbum, both the good and the bad. Please contact us via support@jalbum.net or via our user forum at http://jalbum.net/forum if there is anything you’d like to see changed, added or improved.

After a rather long break we finally have jAlbum 12.2 out. I’d like to share some of the highlights with you. As always you’ll find the full list of enhancements in our release notes.

New full screen slide show

jAlbum has a rewritten full screen slide show that simplifies the process of approving images. The slide show mode is not just convenient for local album presentation, it’s foremost intended to help you approve and reject images. The previous slide show allowed you to rate and flag images using your keyboard, but that was rather hidden. We now display UI controls for rating, flagging, excluding and deleting unwanted images. To hide these controls, just move the mouse to a side of the screen. The new slide show also simplifies navigation by providing first/last buttons and displaying the current position.

Zoom support

You can now zoom into your images using jAlbum’s edit panel to further assist you in your image approval process. Either use the mouse wheel or the zoom slider to zoom in and out. You can toggle max/min zoom by double clicking the image. Use the zoom control panel in the lower right of the image to pan or simply drag the mouse inside a zoomed image. To hide the zoom control panel, simply move the mouse out of the image area.

Sub directory chaining

jAlbum is a great tool to present loads of images organized in hierarchical folder structures. While this is great for keeping things organized, you may still want to allow your visitors to navigate the album in a sequential manner.

This means that clicking the “next” button of the last image in folder A will take you to the first image in folder “B” etc. To enable this feature, select “Chain directories” under “Advanced” album settings. Here’s an example of the same album presented without and with chained directories so you can compare.

Note: It is currently not recommended to use directory chaining on an album where a folder contains a mix of images and folders. You will end up with a confusing navigation.

Improved TIFF reading

Now running on Java 8

Experimental JavaScript support

Upon reports that some TIFF images weren’t rendered correctly (showed up as grey snow), we’ve switched the preferred library for TIFF reading from Apache Sanselan to Sun’s (now Oracle) Advanced Imaging Tools. Please report to us if you encounter any problems reading TIFF images that you didn’t have previously. To switch back to the Apache Sanselan library, simply delete the file jai_imageio-1.1.jar from jAlbum’s “lib” folder. To locate jAlbum’s “lib” folder, select Tools → Open directories → Program directory.

jAlbum 12.2 is approved for Java 8, the latest version of Oracle’s awesome cross platform software environment. The Windows version now runs on a bundled Oracle Java 8 instead of Java 7 and is therefore more performant than ever. This bundled Java engine is local to jAlbum only and therefore does not present any potential security risk. The security problems reported in the past have mostly been related to integrating Java in the browser.

jAlbum skin developers have so far been required to master a rather rich set of skills, which has narrowed the potential developer base. On top of the “must have” skills for web developers, which are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, they have also needed to understand Java or BeanShell (scripted Java) to create the user interface for skin settings and for some skin logic. We will soon allow skin developers to use ordinary JavaScript for these tasks too. jAlbum 12.2 currently allows you to play with this brand new and super fast Nashorn JavaScript engine inside jAlbum’s system console window. We’ve measured speed gains up to 6000 times (!) The future will tell how much this turbo charged scripting engine will impact album generation time...

I guess you've all seen theme images that gets cropped like this in the Turtle skin:

Now, we've made a plugin for jAlbum 12.1 and onwards that helps you set the desired crop focus, so your theme images or folder thumbnails will look like this instead:

Get the plugin here, then right click an image or folder and select "Set crop focus" and take it from there.

Here's how the plugin looks in action. Just use the mouse to position the crop focus. Note: The plugin lets you preview the cropped region using a couple of sample shapes but it doesn't let you set the crop shape. This is usually controlled by the skin.

We encourage you who are Java developers to contribute with smart plugins for jAlbum. Our plugin API is documented here and you can get the full source for the CropFocus plugin at GoogleCode . CropFocus is licensed under the liberal Apache 2.0 license.